Wild Sex, Drugs, Howling in the Desert

As the every-man-for-himself capitalism grows stronger, the demand for drugs climbs higher.[1] America ranks number one for its guns, for its financial coup d’état and for Wall Street terrorist bums. Domestic shock and awe, a doctrine Friedman wrought, keeps the privileged at the top.

The robber barons profit by turning the country into the land of calamity. They ride high on bubbles and bursts of opportunity, while the drug trade shines most appealing to the middle class. The breaking-bad, big-dollar industry provides jobs in ‘Amexican’ crassness. Cocaine, marijuana, meth—it’s the new opiate of the masses.[2]

With howling voices in the desert, we suffer the highest rates of mental confusion, anxiety, loneliness, depression. The meaningless, dizzy disconnect spins people in the hectic congestion.

Inequality drives up the burning craving for drugs, legal or illicit.[3] Advertisements push us to purchase more stuff, guzzling cars, clothes, and a trinket. Buy some bling, impress the girls or enjoy wild sex on a junket.

At the glow of my own sweat at night, I howl in the desert. The Wall Street storm blew us into a wasteland of dirt. Millions of people walk the streets homeless by foreclosures. We look for comfort in a drug that reassures.

The 99-percenters run a treadmill for the dwindling carrot. We gravel and crawl for shiny chariots. For decades the frenzy continues to spin down an endless rabbit hole lost. It drives more souls caught up in the feel-good drugs in exchange for love. You just can’t win when you’re dealt a losing hand unless you bluff.

When Ryan came back from missions in Iraq, his mom found a shell of a man.[4] Among the millions unemployed like him, many opt-in to fight the endless wars for oil in the sand. They learn to become an Army of one, all gung-ho, or so the recruitment commercials go. The Pentagon creates a brave, warrior brand of honor and duty. Young men from the lower rungs join up for dignity. It feels better than flipping Big Macs. Ryan liked to wear that manly uniform, shiny buttons, and a big hat. Ryan graduated from No-think High School without a goal, where they taught him nothing about the neocons. So he still believed in bravery and leprechauns.

These days the military hardly does more than serving corporate greed, securing reliable access to crude and other profit needs. It’s the new patriotism. For many out of a job, it’s a way to make a buck in our empire’s nihilism.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street terrorists bomb the global economy. It’s a laissez-faire market made by and for the neocons to count their money. Following that sick crowd only shows our blind insanity. It’s healthier to break free from behind the lies to reality.

Like the shadow of a cloud, hardly anyone notices what happens over time, but the results become clear. History comes back to haunt us with the Gilded Age so near. “It’s just business,” says the Trump, “nothing personal.” The military recruits only fleshy machines for the arsenal. And when the soldiers return home and settle, they look for jobs and often pick up a needle.[4]

Take a few Xanax pills. It makes a bad job feel like sliding down hills. Wash them down with vodka to deaden the verve. A little smack can go a long way, calming shattered souls and spliced nerves. It’s the elixir for the shell-shocked.

Overdose on smack and all your nightmares are shot. Your sweaty tremors, your spirit-eating flashbacks vanish. Soldiers return home and get locked out, go off their leash.

More soldiers leave this world by suicide than by combat.[5] They fly over the cuckoo’s nest on the wings of a bat. Civilians try to keep up with the numbers with forty thousand a year. Overdose on smack, coke, meth, crack, or on Zoloft, Prozac, Ambien, Zyprexa, just to shut off the voices in your ear.

In our self-proclaimed freedom we all hustle like one-dimensional zombies. We conform more than any other countries. We sing and salute along to the tune of party lines. The lords bully us like Big Brothers, got us all heads down in the paradigms. The trend rushes face first into the abyss of trillions of dollars. We get high to feel normal and cope with our tight collars. We do our best to blend into this insane asylum. The patricians spend billions to stop drugs, stop Occupy Wall Street protesters with war drums.[5] America’s primo solution to any problem is the Pentagon’s droning hums.

The nobles wage war on American workers. But we, the servants, we enjoy the mind-escaping drugs, like good midnight tokers. I demand to trip out with TV, zone out on pot. It’s the new portal to infamy. Only the barons can make a move in a world of inequality. Floating on meth’s smoke, we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, defy gravity and fly over the crushed mobility.

The robber barons wage war, police gunshots, against the very drugs that Americans crave to survive in their failing lot. The dog-eat-dog corporate state took all the power and now reigns. While the corporate-owned elected officials give Big Oil and Wall-Street terrorists free rein. The bandits have been plundering the middle class for decades. Mex-American druglords and officials have been trafficking even before renegades.

The country ranks first in child poverty. The poor, the uneducated, prefer the use of crack to tread through the stormy waters of inequity where the Fates determine their harsh horizons.[6] They buy crack at discount basement bargains. The poor can’t afford a legal pharmaceutical. They might as well drink through the darkness with mescal.

Crack nurses the growing numbers of outcasts to feel good from time to time. It gives us delusions of hope and a sense of rhythm and rhyme.

The upper middle class prefers cocaine. The attorneys, architects, and Wall Street brokers enjoy pure snow to play the game. They snort a line when they have to meet a short deadline. They work hard for their lifestyle, worshiping Bacchus’ behind.[7]

Bounding from the top of the tall buildings, the 1 percenters never mingle with the rabble below. Big Jim Dimon stops at Wall St. and Board, howling and steps from his limo. He does a little blow, flanked by his entourage of Senators protecting his hoard.[8] With his presidential cuff-links, Big Jim has diamonds embedded in his teeth. A felon holding a silk purse of impunity, Big Jim chews on a pig’s ear as he claims he’s not a cheat. His buddies gamble billions with taxpayer bucks. Big Jim sits on a pyramid of blackmail and risky luck. One senator told how farmers lost it all in Big Jim’s derivative schemes and how entire towns like Birmingham and Stockton became graveyards of dreams.

The senators called Big Jim to a hearing, but he’d already bought all the senators in the Banking Committee. Big Jim just rolls his eyes saying, “It’s a pity.”.[9] Big Jim has a lot of friends at the top of tall buildings. They take exclusive elevators up to avoid contact with proletarian landings. Reagan, Bush, Kissinger, Mozilo, Geithner, Summers, Greenspan, Paulson, Bernanke, Romney. So many neocons love that rush of the card deal and racketeered money.

It’s a high like a cocaine feel. When they win, they reel in the gold pot. When they lose, they win; they take the taxpayers’ lot. Either way Big Jim stays at the top with his mansions, jets, islands, and yachts. He and his buddies own the Federal Reserve and the keys to Fort Knox. He and his friends like their blow pure and their escorts dirty and tight. They can crank it up, chill on boo, and ride young ponies all night.[10]

Beyond laws, neocons thrive in their secured penthouse in clouds. They are players, gamblers swingers, hiding behind their self-serving shrouds. They own Congress and the circus of public hearings. Their power soars beyond Gods’ blessings. They fly without limits and swoop near the sun without scorching a feather. They prop up the country’s debt and decide Greece or Iceland’s weather.

The world kneels down to these lords of unbridled enterprises. They are the aristocracy and the monarchy taking the prizes like the Spanish kings. They want America to work just like Mexico where for them the bell rings. It does not toll for you or for me. The lords own their own feudal islands—entire and for themselves and against the good of the lands.

Each one is a maker of the market. Their lobbyists clothe and launder their fraud and profit. They blow up the World Trade Towers and then party until late hours. They are the heirs of oligopoly and monopoly and crush any innovations and mobility. They regulate individual behavior—abortion, contraception, speech, and protests—while keeping their corporations covered in secrets of self-interests.[11]

Us regular folks, most of us, are savages and respect nothing more than those in power. I dream of becoming just like them every hour. When I become aware of my impotence, I anguish under the weight of cement and iron and turn a blind eye sour. I look for escapes that allow me to give up my dreams by burning them in the sacrificial fires. I crave drugs and get high. It calms my own desires. Without the drug prohibitions, my sex drive would run like wolves wild. I lose myself in alternate universes, working hard to become a good consumer with debts piled.

So we ignore how the privileged loot our coffers. The crowd respects nothing more than those money mongers. We invite these vampires to suck the blood from our minds as they claim to let it trickle back down to us, a tiny drop at a time. The rich piss down on us from their high towers and call that economic policy so fine.

We sacrifice our children, if not their lives in endless wars, then in their education, health and in a failed environment. We prostrate before these medieval lords as if they were the lineage of a royal sacrament. We hardly inquiry whether they are worthy of our worship.

Heirs of Moloch, the barons practice a long history of war crimes, torture, and demonic lordship.

We deny our own thoughts and tremble to the core in the hope to placate these demi-gods. We pull the oars for the ship of state but lose sight in all the fogs.

We grow up in this world of cheats and remain penniless. As believers in what the schools teach, we are clueless. We easily give up what is most precious—our own conscience. We strive to appease these banksters and generals and officials without common sense.

We empower those born into high places, loaded with blood money. The more we give up our freedoms, the patricians demand more honey. They say universal healthcare only makes government bloated. In the same breath, they call for more bailouts whenever they engorge their cookie jars sugar-coated.

The robber barons want more military machinery, and more profitable private prisons to lock us up—those who sell and buy drugs on the streets. They send in the plebs, the well-intended police, to wage war in the dark-alley beats, but never to touch the cartel lords and the cash laundering discreet.

Banker Bagley washes that blood cash for his vaults too big to fail, while they send the little dopers deep into jail. Banker Bagley grants loans to build private prisons, while attorneys, police, and paramilitary make up a new industry to chain us down. They make prohibition profitable while they protect the drug lords in the nice parts of town.[12]

This is the source of Moloch’s power. The cringing slaves of the working classes create the platform for Moloch’s heirs and they stand and pronounce their demands. We, slaves, build the schools and then we teach our children the nation’s history according to Moloch’s versions.[13] We plebs build their high towers, their yachts, planes, and mansions. We pay the taxes. We shrug our shoulders like Atlas. Meanwhile, they read a book by Aryan Rand and recite it like some bible-cult full of greed and twisted religious rant.

There are many stories about Wall Street Executives (brokers) consume cocaine and other drugs, living the life of excess. New York Times, March 25, 2000; Wall Street turns a blind eye to drugs – The Vista, Nov. 3, 2011

There are numerous articles in the press about this topic of how the too-big-to-fail banks are desperately increasing their assets by laundering—mostly Mexican—drug cartel cash.

Howard Zinn, The People’s History of the United States, Harper Perennial Modern Classics (August 2, 2005). Consider reading this book by Howard Zinn to obtain a more realistic version of U.S. history. Most public and private schools in the U.S. teach history with a sugar-coated perspective.

I grew up in Stockton, California. Went to college at UC Santa Cruz Lived in Europe for more than 15 years, France, Germany.

I've written novels: Mojave Winds, Second Edition >> A beautiful, Persian classical dancer finds love in the least expected place, the Mojave Desert. Sheila has it all: a fabulous dancing career, working the grand Las Vegas theme hotels. One thing is missing: romance, love, and passion. But when she meets Kris Klug under unusual circumstances, she's drawn to a man who sweeps her off her feet literally and figuratively. She discovers how her connection to Klug is the real deal. So many high-class men wanted her only as a trophy wife. Klug takes Sheila behind the illusions and gets down and dirty into gritty survival. Sheila discovers an authentic and strong side of her. Klug might guide her to safety, but she learns how to gain his heart. Is his desperate past something she can help to heal? Or will the their dangerous predicament consume them?

A Sufi's Ghost, Second Edition >> Carmen commits a capital crime. She disobeys her husband. Worse yet, she leaves her husband's house alone. Worse yet, she took one of his many Mercedes to meet a man. She's been in a disastrous marriage since the wedding day, almost five years ago. Stuck in Saudi Arabia, she is on the run to get out. Born in Persia, raised in Paris, she thirsts for freedom ever since her mother arranged the marriage to a Saudi prince. Bright, well-educated, elegant, she wants more than a cloistered life in the desert. Larry Larson left the CIA only a couple months ago, so disenchanted about how his service as a case officer ruined his private life. His wife left him. Now he returns to Saudi Arabia to hunt down al-Qaeda lieutenants for the reward money. Big money can help ease the pain and fix his messed up life, and help him to regain his losses. When his main source of information, Prince Nabir, is assassinated, he's desperate and needs a break. He meets Carmen, who takes him on a wild ride through the desert, following the ghost of a prominent Sufi.

A collection of 11 short stories: Californians and Other Cowboys >> Sample summaries of some of the stories ]] In Two Birds of Paradise, we learn that Todd's wife left him after he lost a leg and returned from Iraq. He meets someone at the Los Angeles Hilton who has a lot in common with him. She knows how to ease his worries and make the time fly.

In Stay Frosty, we are surprised to see that Kris Klug has returned to the readers who first met him in the novel, Mojave Winds, where he seemed to have won the battle. In Stay Frosty, we find that he has not won the war. His wife, Sheila, witnesses the kidnapping of her best friend and fellow dancer. As Klug quickly takes action to search and rescue Sheila's friend, he runs up against a group of bikers, who make a living by bartering women for drugs from Mexico to sell in California. This short story, Stay Frosty dovetails into the sequel novel, Mexican Trade.

In The Iraqi Woman, we discover the Bedouin, a young Iraqi woman locked up alone in a house. Her wealthy husband made an exception to local customs by allowing her to remain alive after the Bedouin kidnapped her. She became a tainted woman, touched by the Bedouin.

From his rooftop lookout, Lutter watches her bathe every afternoon. Francois Lutter is working his network in the war torn Iraq, trading in contraband, weapons, unloading cash from convoys, drugs.... With his binoculars, he watches for the convoys and admires the young woman bathing and the tattoos the Bedouin gave her. He just has to talk with her even though that may cost him his life.